Because I'm Worth it (3 page)

“And maybe take your shirt off, too,” Vanessa suggested.
Making Poetry
was going to be about the artistic process, illustrating that what
doesn’t
go into the work is just as important as what does. There would be lots of shots of Dan crumpling up paper and throwing it angrily across the room. Vanessa wanted to show that writing—or creating anything, for that matter—wasn’t just a mental exercise: it was
physical
. Plus, Dan had these great little muscles in his back that she couldn’t wait to get on film.

Dan stood up and peeled off his plain black T-shirt, tossing it onto his unmade bed where the Humphreys’ fat old cat, Marx, lay asleep on his back like a furry beached whale. Everything about the apartment Dan shared with his father, Rufus, an editor of lesser-known Beat poets, and his little sister, Jenny, was unmade, falling apart, or at the very least completely covered with cat hair and dust bunnies. It was a large, bright, high-ceilinged apartment, but it hadn’t been properly cleaned in twenty years, and the crumbling walls were gasping for a new coat of paint. Dan and his father and sister rarely threw anything away, either, so the sagging furniture and scratched wooden floors were strewn with old newspapers and magazines, out-of-print books, incomplete decks of cards, used batteries, and unsharpened pencils. It was the kind of place where your coffee got cat hair in it the minute you poured it, which was a problem Dan dealt with constantly because he was completely addicted to caffeine.

“Do you want me to face the camera?” he asked, sitting down on his worn wooden desk chair and swiveling it toward Vanessa. “I could hold the notebook in my lap and write like this,” he demonstrated.

Vanessa knelt down and squinted through the camera lens. She was wearing her gray pleated Constance Billard uniform with black tights, and the brown shag carpet felt bristly against her knees. “Yes, that’s nice,” she murmured. Oh, just look how pale and smooth Dan’s chest was! She could see every rib, and that nice line of tawny peach fuzz that ran up his belly to his navel! She inched forward on her knees, trying to get as close as possible without ruining the frame.

Dan bit the end of his pen, smiled to himself, and then wrote,
She’s got a shaved head, she wears black all the time, she needs a new pair of combat boots, and she hates to wear makeup. But she’s the kind of girl who believes in you and secretly gets your best poem published in
The New Yorker
. I guess you could say I love her.

It was probably the corniest thing he’d ever written, but it wasn’t like he was going to publish it in his “Greatest Works” or anything.

Vanessa inched forward some more, trying to capture the fervent white of Dan’s knuckles as he scribbled away. “What are you writing?” She pressed the record-sound button on her camera.

Dan looked up, grinning at her through his messy bangs, his golden brown eyes shining. “It’s not a poem. It’s just a little story about you.”

Vanessa felt her whole body warm up. “Read it out loud.”

Dan scratched his chin self-consciously and then cleared his throat. “Okay. ‘She’s got a shaved head . . . ,’” he began, reading what he’d written.

Vanessa blushed as she listened and then dropped the camera on the floor. She walked on her knees over to where Dan was sitting, pushed his notebook out of the way, and laid her head in his lap.

“You know how we’re always talking about having sex but we’ve never done it?” she whispered, her lips brushing the rough cloth of his army-green cargo pants. “Why don’t we do it right now?”

Beneath her cheek she felt Dan’s thigh muscle tighten. “Now?” He looked down and traced his finger along the edge of Vanessa’s ear. She had four piercings in each ear, but none of them had earrings in them. He took a deep breath. He’d been saving sex for a moment when it seemed poetic and
right
. Maybe that time was
right now
, a spontaneous moment. It seemed especially apt and ironic when in exactly an hour he’d be back at Riverside Prep, sitting in last-period AP Latin, listening to Dr. Werd read Ovid in his over-the-top Latin-nerd accent.

Introducing double-free-period sex—the latest offering on the spring curriculum.

“Okay,” Dan agreed. “Let’s do it.”

Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

hey people!

Early rejection

So I heard the Ivies have come up with a conspiracy to maintain their intrigue and exclusivity: This year they’re not accepting
anyone
early. Maybe it’s only a false rumor. But if you don’t get in early, try to think of it this way: Maybe you were
too
perfect. They just couldn’t handle it. And just think how much fun we’ll have if we all wind up at the same community college!

To surgically enhance or not, that is the question

The idea of surgically altering one’s body in any way has always freaked me out, not because I don’t think Dolly Parton looks great. She doesn’t look a day over forty and she must be two hundred by now. But I’d be worried the doctors would make a mistake and deflate one breast entirely or leave out a nostril or something. Of course I’m as girly a girl as girls come, and I know how important it is to feel good about my appearance. I try to think of it this way though: You know when you see a gorgeous boy on the street and you say to your friend, “Look at
him
!” and then your friend makes a face like,
ugly
? We all have such
totally
varied tastes that someone is going to look at you and think,
yum-yum
dee
-lish
, no matter what
you
think you look like. You just have to learn to see what they see.

Your e-mail

Q:
    Dear G-Girl,

I heard you got in early to Bryn Mawr and you’re psyched because you like going to school with girls and you’re this huge volleyball-playing lesbo. Tee hee.

—dorf

A:
    Hello dorf,

What kind of a name is dorf, anyway? I refuse to stoop to your level of humor or tell you where I applied to college, but my mother and sister both happened to go to Bryn Mawr, and guess what? They’re both
hot
.

—GG

Gotta dash home and check the mail for an important-looking business-sized envelope that may or may not determine my entire near future. Wish me luck!

You know you love me.

gossip girl

waspoid prince tries to score

When last-period French was finally over, Nate Archibald bid a hasty
à demain
to his St. Jude’s School classmates and hurried up Madison Avenue to the pizza place on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street, the workplace of his dependable pot dealer, Mitchell. Lucky for Nate, St. Jude’s was the oldest boys’ school in Manhattan and had kept its tradition of ending the school day at 2
P.M.
for both lower- and upper-school boys, even though most of the other city schools let out at 4
P.M.
The school’s reasoning was that it gave the boys extra time to play sports and do the copious amounts of homework they were sent home with every afternoon. It also gave them plenty of time to kick back and get high before, during, and
after
they played sports and did their homework.

The last time Nate had seen Mitchell, the wisecracking Kangol hat–wearing dealer had said he’d be moving back home to Amsterdam very soon. Today was Nate’s last chance to score the biggest bag of sweet, Peruvian-grown weed Mitchell could provide. Blair had always complained about Nate’s pot-smoking when they were together, whining about how boring it was to watch him staring at the Persian rug on her bedroom floor for ten minutes when they could have been fooling around or at a party somewhere. Nate had always maintained that his pot-smoking was a mere indulgence, like eating chocolate—something he could give up any time. And just to prove it—not that he
needed
to prove anything to Blair anymore—he was going to go cold turkey after he’d smoked every last leaf of pot from the giant bag he was going to buy today. If he were careful, he could make the bag last a good eight weeks. Until then he preferred not to even
think
about quitting.

“Two plain slices,” Nate told the gangly, balding pizza chef wearing a bright purple W
ELCOME TO
L
OSERVILLE
T-shirt. He rested his elbows on the pizza joint’s red linoleum counter-top, nudging aside plastic containers filled with garlic salt, red pepper flakes, and oregano. “Where’s Mitchell?”

Mitchell’s little side business was no secret in the pizza parlor. The pizza chef raised his bushy black eyebrows. His name might actually have been Ray, but even after years of buying pizza and pot there Nate still wasn’t sure. “Mitchell’s gone already. You missed him.”

Nate patted the back pocket of his khakis, where he’d shoved his bulging Coach wallet, a sour lump of panic rising in his throat. Of course he wasn’t
addicted
, but he didn’t like being stuck without any weed at all when he’d been planning to roll a nice big fatty to while away the afternoon. And tomorrow afternoon, and the day after that . . .

“What? You mean he left for Amsterdam already?”

Ray—or maybe it was Roy—pulled open the shiny chrome door of the pizza oven and in one expert motion slipped two hot slices onto a double layer of paper plates and slid them across the counter in Nate’s direction. “Sorry, buddy,” he said only half sympathetically. “But from now on we sell pizza and soda and
only
pizza and soda. Got it?”

Nate picked up the plate of pizza and then put it down on the counter again. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. He pulled out his wallet and removed a ten-dollar bill from the fat wad inside. “Keep the change,” he muttered, dropping the bill on the counter before leaving with his pizza.

Out on the street, he wandered aimlessly toward the park, feeling like an abandoned dog. He’d been buying weed from Mitchell ever since eighth grade. One random May afternoon, Nate and his buddy Jeremy Scott Tompkinson had gone into the pizza place to buy a slice, and Mitchell had overheard Jeremy daring Nate to steal the container of oregano so they could take it home and smoke it. Mitchell had proposed to sell them something even more mood-enhancing, and Nate and his buddies had been coming back ever since. What was he supposed to do now, buy dime bags from one of those random, shifty-looking dudes in Central Park? Most of those guys sold crappy, dry, Texas-grown stuff anyway, not the succulent green buds Mitchell got directly from his uncle in Peru. Besides, he’d heard half the Central Park dealers were narcs just waiting to bust a kid like him.

Dumping his half-eaten pizza slices in the nearest garbage can, Nate dug into the pockets of his Hugo Boss naval officer–style coat, searching for a leftover roach. When he found one he crossed Fifth Avenue and crouched on a park bench to light it, ignoring the group of giggling tenth-grade girls in dark blue Constance Billard uniforms ogling him lustily as they walked by.

With his I-know-I’m-hot smile, his golden brown hair, his emerald green eyes, his always-tanned skin, and his sexy expertise in building and racing sailboats, Nate Archibald was the most lusted-after boy on the Upper East Side. He didn’t have to go looking for girls. They just fell into his lap. Literally.

Nate sucked hard on the burning roach and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. The problem was, his other stoner St. Jude’s buddies—Jeremy Scott Tompkinson, Charlie Dern, and Anthony Avuldsen—all bought from Mitchell, too. Mitchell was the best. But it was worth calling just to find out if any of them had managed to score a big stash before their dealer had disappeared.

Jeremy was in a cab on his way to an interschool squash club game at the Ninety-second Street Y. “Sorry, dude,” his voice crackled over the line. “I’ve been doing mom’s Zoloft all day. Why don’t you just buy a dime bag from one of those dealers in the park or something?”

Nate shrugged. Something about buying a dime bag in the park seemed so . . .
lame
. “Whatever, man,” he told Jeremy. “See you tomorrow.”

Charlie was in the Virgin megastore, buying DVDs with his little brother. “Bummer,” he said when Nate told him about the situation. “But you’re right near the park, right? Just buy a dime bag.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Nate replied. “See you tomorrow.”

Anthony was having a driving lesson in the new BMW M3 sports car his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday last weekend. “Check your mom’s medicine cabinet,” he advised. “Parents are the ultimate resource.”

“I’ll look into it,” Nate answered. “Later.” He clicked off and sucked the last drag off his puny little roach. “Damn!” he cursed, flicking the charred remnants into the dirty snow beneath his feet. This semester was supposed to have been a twenty-four-hour party. He’d had an awesome interview at Brown in November, and he was pretty sure his application rocked hard enough to get him in. Plus he was no longer hanging out with little Jenny Humphrey, who was very sweet and had a great rack, but who’d taken up a shitload of his free time. For the rest of senior year Nate had been planning to smoke up, kick back, and just stay mellow until graduation, but without his trusty dealer, that plan was basically moot.